The Wake

Mai Na Lee’s earliest memories are of school. Living with her mother and older brother in a village in Laos, Lee spent her time playing around the village’s open-walled schoolhouse, watching her brother lead other students through lessons. He was the best in the class and she looked up to him.

Unfortunately, Lee was too young for school. Hmong tradition dictated that school-age children must be able to wrap an arm over their head and touch the opposite ear. Try as she might, Lee was still too small.

She was too small to really comprehend it when her father returned from the war, after 14 years of being a soldier in Vang Pao’s army. Like other Hmong, he had fought for the United States during the Vietnam War, as part of the CIA’s secret Special Guerilla Unit of Hmong soldiers. Lee’s mother had spent years traveling from fort to fort with him, pregnant and carrying her first-born son. But when the next three children died, she was sent back to the village to have her daughter and work in a farm.

“I remember I just had a normal life,” Lee says, her small size emphasized by the large amount of clutter in her temporary office on the University of Minnesota’s West Bank. A more permanent office is pending for the brand-new position Lee occupies, a posting shared by the History and Asian-American Studies departments.

Lee is a lot of firsts. She is the first female Hmong professor at the University of Minnesota and is teaching the first course on Hmong history. She is also the first Hmong woman to earn a PhD from UW-Madison and the first Hmong in the United States to earn a PhD degree in history. However, “I don’t feel like I’m the ‘first.’ It’s not a part of my intellectual identity,” Lee says.

Just as she had envisioned, though, Lee always excelled at school. Upon arrival into the United States, Lee was thrown into the third grade. She spoke no English and it was her first time in a school. “Every day, for about an hour, I went to the kindergarten to practice the alphabet,” she says. Math was no problem and she learned to read with the help of a tutor. After a year living in Omro, Wisconsin, the family made contact with relatives in St. Paul. They decided to join them in the Twin Cities. The loneliness in Omro had been too much, especially for Lee’s parents. They had been the only Hmong family in the town. “The stores had no rice,” Lee says.

In the St. Paul public schools, Lee was often the unofficial interpreter for Hmong families. When she graduated, she planned to study what she had initially excelled at – math or science. As a freshman at Carleton College, she was a pre-med student but decided to take a freshman seminar in history.

A lecture on the decision of a Chinese nationalist to give up his medical practice to work for his country inspired her to look into the history of the Hmong. To her surprise, there was nothing in the libraries. “How can a group of people that were a backbone of the Vietnam War not be a part of history?” Lee asks. “I realized I needed to become a historian. I needed to tell my father’s story and to make sure that history doesn’t forget this group of people,” she says. “As a nonliterate society, the Hmong don’t write their records down. I knew I needed to put them into written history, to make it real.”

After Carleton, Lee went to the University of Wisconsin-Madison to get her Ph.D. in history, specializing in Southeast Asia. “In her statement, she talked about the reason she switched to history, this ‘hole in her heart,’” says Al McCoy, a history professor at UW who advised Lee’s dissertation. When she started doing the job search, she worried that her Carleton roommates had been right about her decision to leave the pre-med track. (“Mai Na, you’re gonna end up driving a bus!”) The chair of one search committee joked that they’d love to hire someone like her but “then we’d have to explain who the Hmong are.”

She did get a few offers, though, one of them for a presidential post-doctorate at the University of Minnesota. “I thought it was really important that the history department have someone who dealt with Southeast Asia,” says Ann Waltner, history professor and former associate dean of the College of Liberal Arts. “Because of the local presence of the Hmong, that represents a real opportunity to take the lead in studying them and the upper Midwest, which has ramifications for the history of American immigration in general. […] We’ve become aware of how interesting the community we live in is.”

She accepted and taught classes for past two years, while being involved in developing her current position, which she applied for and got this year.

Her role as a teacher of Hmong history is clearly informed by her own personal experiences. Her father’s return from the war was the first sign of drastic changes to Lee’s life in the village.

He was a stranger to her, wearing his fatigues and constantly pacing. Eventually, he couldn’t get out of bed to pace. He was too sick to leave in 1975 when, after the withdrawal of the U.S., the communists overthrew the Hmong people and, facing persecution, the Hmong began a mass exodus to refugee camps in Thailand and later immigration to the U.S. “We stayed there until 1979. After that we went into the mountains,” Lee says. “Then it became very real to me.”

To her it was just days upon days but she later learned from her parents that they wandered in the jungle for several months, living off what they could find. Her father, the former captain, was the resistance leader in the region and in charge of the group of roughly two hundred women, children, and elderly. Ultimately, the group surrendered and was among the 500,000 to 700,000 Hmong to live in Vietnam after the war.

The constant questioning and harassment by Vietnamese soldiers was impossible to endure, even for Lee’s father, who had not wanted to leave Laos. “He was very patriotic,” Lee says. “He told my mother, ‘I’m going to die here.’” The daily abuse had changed his mind, however - as had the knowledge that Vang Pao himself had fled to the U.S.

Eventually, they journeyed back through the jungle towards the Thai border. There the family lived in miserable conditions in a refugee camp and went through the interview process to immigrate.

While her personal biography had a role in her decision making, her ability to transcend ethnic and historical boundaries in her work is arguably her greatest asset.

“She has the potential to become one of the finest historians of her generation,” McCoy says. “She writes in a broad way about matters of identity and history.”

Mike Cullinane, director of the Southeast Asian Studies center at UW Madison, agrees. “Her real strength is that she can go way beyond the Hmong,” he says.

For the time being, Lee is focusing on her work and on her teaching, once again at home in the classroom.